Life is Messy: My Struggle with Owning My Expectations

– by Rachel

Life with an almost 2-year-old is messy. Mealtimes are a mess. Playtime makes a mess. Even bath time, when supposedly we are cleaning up, leaves water all over the floor and requires cleaning up after. In addition to all this physical mess, there is the mess an almost 2-year-old will make of your schedule, your plans, and perhaps even your relationships with other adults. My daughter is almost 2 and I can assure you, our life is a mess.
This is not a post about how horrible my life is now that I am a mother. Neither is it a post about how I have come to appreciate the beauty in this mess I now call my life. The scope of this post is much smaller, much less profound. This is about my struggle to accept and about my own feelings and about listening to my mother.
When you first have a baby people tell you to calm down and lower your expectations. Then they go on and on about the one person they know who can magically “do it all” and how amazing she is. It is a mixed message. On the one hand, we are told that no one can keep up and you shouldn’t feel bad for letting some less important things go. “Your kids won’t remember if the dishes were done. They will remember that you spent time with them.”On the other hand, we put people up on a pedestal when they seem to have it all under control. We idolize the person who can do it all and in the process, we negate every message about finding balance and focusing on what’s truly important. When I had my daughter in November of 2011 I was determined to be “that one person” who still had a clean house and worked full time and made home cooked meals for her family. I criticize my performance all the time. I never feel my house in clean enough. We eat way more Mac & Cheese than I would like to admit. I resent every hour I spend at my job.
I don’t think I will ever be at peace with these realities. I’m too type A for that. But what I have learned to accept is that my disappointment with myself is only that. It is entirely a problem I have with my own self. – Me vs. my expectations – Me vs. my judgment. Other people have opinions about my life and my priorities – sure. But they are not what my struggle is about. My struggle is with myself. I may not be ready to accept myself as I am, but I have taken responsibility for my own expectations of myself. I have taken responsibility for my disappointment and frustration and priorities.
Those feelings are as real as anything else that exists in this world. I work very hard to make sure my daughter knows she is entitled to her feelings and also knows that she is responsible for them. Still, it’s a hard lesson to apply to myself. When I come home and my house is a disaster, I want to be mad at someone. I want it to be someone’s fault. It’s not. I have to accept that I am angry about the mess because I feel that its existence is proof of my own failure. I have a right to be frustrated. I have an obligation to acknowledge that my frustration is the product of my own expectations.
The other day I was talking to my mother about how my evening with my daughter had gone. I said it was “bi-polar” which is my un-PC way of saying it was really bad and then really good in turns. I told my mother about our dinner during which I was more frustrated than normal because my daughter made a huge mess. Spitting milk onto her lasagna. Squeezing her fruit until the juice dripped out onto the table and her plate. Throwing the disgusting concoction of lasagna-milk-fruit onto the floor. It was gross and I was mad. But after I cleaned her up, I told my mom about how she played by herself for ½ an hour. She let me finish my dinner in peace. She was taking the towels out of the linen closet and arranging them into different piles on the floor in the hallway. Every once in a while she would come in to tell me about it, babbling in her toddler speak. Showing me her ability to unfold the washcloths or lay out the bath mats. She was happily entertaining herself and I was proud to tell my mom about her ability to do so.
My mother is a very insightful woman. After listening to my evening she said “You know the only real difference between these two events was YOUR attitude about them.” As usual, she is right. My daughter spent dinnertime and playtime exploring her world, mixing things together, making new combinations, and discovering reactions. The fact that I saw dinner as a disaster and playtime as a success was entirely my own point of view.
Messes will probably always be a trigger for me. I will probably always have high expectations for myself. Life with kids is likely to continue to be messy. But every day I will try to keep my attitude in perspective because owning my emotions and my expectations mean I can decide what to do with them. I’m planning to try to use them to make my life more peaceful. But it’s a long and messy road.